DOWNEY – About 200 local educators gathered Thursday at the Los Angeles County Office of Education headquarters to hear the latest and not so greatest news about gangs and their impact on schools and youths.

The group, which included school administrators and security officers for campuses throughout L.A. County, heard from law enforcement experts including Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration Chief Larry Villalobos and retired L.A. County sheriff’s gang investigator and gang expert Richard Valdemar.

Baca said the true key to thwarting gang violence lies in education, for both youths and adults who have been incarcerated.

“Our policies and politics have lost their way,” said Baca, who noted that he has taught at the junior high, high school and adult school levels and is in the process of revamping the jail system to become an education system.

“If you don’t educate the human mind while they’re in prison they come out the same way, if not worse,” Baca said to applause.

The sheriff was the first of the experts to kick off the daylong conference, which included background on some of the grimmest gang crimes investigated by local, county, state and federal officials.

That included full-color photos taken from crime scenes in Mexico related to drug cartel violence such as the bodies of two decapitated police officers who were dumped at an Acapulco police station and the heads of about half a dozen men rolled across a white-tile dance floor at a club in Michoacan.

The impact the cartels have is global, Villalobos warned, and includes recruitment of local teens.

“All these cartels south of the border are reaching out for our kids, clean kids, who are still in high school, and who don’t have records to buy guns at gun shows and other areas,” Villalobos said. “They get kids who are 18 or 19 who can buy guns legally and then they funnel the guns to the cartels,” who sell them in the highly profitable illegal gun trade.

Those at the conference also learned about all the various gangs that can be found in the area, and across California, and how they function at the street and prison level.

Among the statistics shared with school officials Thursday were estimates of how many gang members are thought to be in the county – around 80,000 – and how much gang crime has impacted the county over the past 25 years, with 10,000 gang-related killings and 100,000 incidents resulting in serious injuries.

School officials and parents need to know the trends because the issue starts at a young age, Valdemar said.

“When I talk to gang members and I ask them to remember when it started, they all say it was grammar school,” Valdemar said. “At 12 years old, in fifth, fourth or sixth grade.”

“Maybe they hadn’t jumped in yet, but they are already gang members,” Valdemar added.

While Baca pushed hard for community leaders to try to educate gang members of all ages, Valdemar warned that some of the most dangerous and violent leaders of the state’s most notorious prison gangs are highly educated, noting the head of the Aryan Brotherhood had his doctoral degree.

Both Baca and Valdemar, however, agreed the reason so many youths seem to fall into the gang lifestyle is because their emotional needs are not being met and they become emotionally and psychologically stunted.

Children in those situations often turn to their peers and outside influences to get the positive reinforcement or support they need, both men said.

“If you have no value for your own life, it’s damn hard to value someone else’s life,” Baca said. “How do young children have such low opinions of their own life? That’s the question we need to ask and to figure out, not how many gangs there are.”